Thursday, 23 January 2014

A Fist in the Face of God presents... Full Speed Ahead - A Mix by Hades

ALRIGHT. Here we have the first mix of the year, compiled by none other than Hades of Greek speed metal band, Omega. I met Hades at a recent metal festival where we talked about our shared love for fast heavy metal with shrieking vocals and naturally we spoke about a mix. He wanted to make a kind of Best Of mix, and he did not disappoint, taking in sounds from 1971 right up until today. Hell, he even managed to squeeze in some Queen (on a speed metal compilation?!).

He also mimicked my usual style of mix covers (this is the first one I did not make of all the mixes to feature on here) and sent over a few different edits of the comp before settling on a 30-track, nigh two-hour long opus. I make one of these every two weeks for my radio show, so it was nice to see what bangers a fellow speed freak would concoct.

And, he even had the good sense to include a ripper off his own band's latest offering The Hell Patrol (that I included on my end of year show), in the midst of action. I will let him tell his tale now…

I came across this heavy metal sub-genre when I was looking for bands playing stuff like the fast songs of Judas Priest, Saxon and Iron Maiden. I had to find more, so I asked an old friend of mine (who has a killer vinyl collection) in my town and he told me about this Speed Metal genre. A week later he gave me a tape compilation with Exciter, Agent Steel, first Anthrax, Warrant (from Germany, of course), Violent Force, and a few more obscure bands from the 80s on it. I was beyond impressed, because I could hear the heavy metal riffs and solo melodies, but in a more THRASHY way and with faster tempo then the usual NWOBHM bands I'd heard previously. This gave me a fascinating mania to DIG deeper and deeper in the 80s underground scene and find more bands playing this so called Speed Metal genre.

Many of you may ask WHY there is a song from Queen and Deep Purple in the compilation—do they play Speed Metal? The answer is "no, they don’t", because there wasn’t a genre called Speed Metal back in the 70s. The reason I HAD to include these specific songs is because they gave the inspiration to bands like Metallica, Exciter, and Anvil to create this heavy metal sub genre in the early 80s. So it’s more or less for history reasons and it’s for those who are interested to learn how all this craze started.

A very important factor was also the Canadian label, Banzai Records, which gave birth of the so-called “Speed Metal Swirl”, which they used for many of their releases, some of which were not even Speed Metal by definition, but they had this mark or symbol for all the extreme and fast metal bands coming out then. I hope people will enjoy this compilation as much as I do and I want to thank all the NEW bands which are still keeping this way of playing metal ALIVE, even after 30 years of existence. Bang your head and raise the dead!
HADES